Team Set Special

Panini's blister pack NBA team sets contain a special bonus this year. 

During the second half of the Blazers recent overtime victory over the Charlotte Hornets, Erin disappeared for a bit to the team shop and picked up a 2017-18 NBA Hoops Blazers team set for me. Usually this blister pack product just has the regular base cards in it and nothing more, but it appears that there's an exclusive bonus this time. I wasn't able to find much info online about this, but this link to the official NBA Store website probably has as many details as anyone could expect to find.

Essentially, each team set contains a special blue parallel. I expected this to be the regular blue parallel you can pull from packs, but it appears to be something entirely different. I'll get to that in a moment.

I did... almost... polish off the regular team set with this purchase. I consider Allen Crabbe's Nets card a must have for my collection, since he's still pictured in a Blazers uniform. Noah Vonleh joins Crabbe in the ranks of ex-Blazers as he was shipped off to Chicago as a cap casualty, a term I am borrowing from the NFL.

The Blazers traded up to get Zach Collins, and after a slow start to his career he has settled into the rotation, which is what ultimately forced Vonleh out. Collins famously never started a college game and hasn't really logged a ton of minutes in his career, so you would expect it to be several years before he fully forms into an impact player.

Here is that bonus card. As you can see, this is more similar to a blue color that we saw with the Walmart Topps baseball parallels from 2011-2014 than the color of the parallels from you can pull from packs. Also worth noting is that the NBA Hoops logo itself is rainbow reflective.

I also just realized that I hate describing what cards look like. I'd rather just collect them.